


170 Words

by Birddi



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Abuse by government, Butterfly Effect, Cannibalism, Child Abuse, Childhood Trauma, Cyberpunk, Dark, Death, F/M, Gen, Genocide, Government Conspiracy, Hackers, Hacking, Hurt Jim, Incest, M/M, Medical Trauma, Multi, Other, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, Self-Harm, Starvation, Survivor Guilt, Tarsus IV, Trauma, Triggers, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-13
Updated: 2016-07-29
Packaged: 2018-05-26 10:22:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 15,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6234859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Birddi/pseuds/Birddi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In 2246, the colony of Tarsus IV experienced a brief but devastating loss of life. The incident ran for six hours in different galactic news outlets before a Klingon trade dispute took front stage. The Starfleet's Official Documentation on what happened on the colony spans a little under two inches on the datapad. One hundred and seventy words.  </p><p>Or, James T. Kirk is made up a fractured moments of pain and it in turn affects everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Survivor

**Author's Note:**

> IT'S GRAPHIC! [Full list of Warnings: Incest, graphic consensual and dubious sex, murderous intentions towards a child, genocide, allusions to murder, starvation, cannibalism, addiction, drug use, prostitution, self-harm, mental and physical illness, suicidal thoughts and behavior, abuse by government, government conspiracies, violence, arguments for and against eugenic theory, and 2nd person POV.]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s nothing else to eat. Well, not for you.

People have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love.

\- Chuck Palahniuk

 

It burns like the worst diarrhea because all it is, is stomach acid. The ground you maw through every few days for worms, grass, anything that you can put into your stomach to make it stop eating itself, has already been leached through with chemicals and mold spores. There’s nothing else to eat. Well, not for you.

Only three miniclicks away are the righteous people, the ones worthy enough to save. They are given rations. Maybe not more than what they’d need, but certainly more than what you or those like you have. You have nothing.

You have baked, polluted earth and the filthy clothes on your back. They reek. You reek. It’s been weeks since you’ve washed and the hair on your head is matted, clumped together with grease and dirt. There’s a persistent itch across your skin caused by a film of dust and sweat. Any water that you come across goes to keeping you sustained, keeping you from vertigo spells that will lay you flat for minutes at a time and from cracked, bleeding lips, and death. This is not the time for civility.

There’s no water, a side-effect from an arrogation system that didn’t rely on rain. Colonies are terraformed to be livable with the latest outposts being designed to produce utopian weather conditions. You figure out pretty quick that condensation is your only way to get uncontaminated water but it’s often not hot enough for that. The weather is warm and cool, and stagnant. The air feels polluted, slimy.

Climate control is only nice in theory.

Your world has quickly become a place divided between the haves and the have-nots. There is a metal chicken-wire fence that once used to gate the handful of livestock out. Now it’s different. The school, and houses, streets with pavement are on one side and you’re on the other. The animals were one of the first things to go. That’s how people knew there was a problem in the food. That the food was dying.

There are still people who walk down the paved streets, healthy and fed.

Through the fence you see women in dresses floating around their knees. They wear pretty pointed shoes and worry over their makeup. There are men, too. They wear jackets over their hunched shoulders and walk with quick steps, always looking down. You watch them from afar. Hidden behind fences and broken, burned out rubble, squatting low and small as a rat. It’s like watching a movie, something bizarre and alien, even though it was only days since that had been you.

You wait for your chance to scavenge, you wait and you watch, you learn. You learn what it means to be one worth saving, and the cost. You hate the women who coil their hair and paint their faces. They smudge color into their skin to hide their gaunt cheeks and walk arm and arm down the street with their shirts pulled low, the sun reflecting off their shrunken breasts. Even their children stand on the stoops of doors, eyes hallow and legs wide. They’re all soldiers’ women, now. You know what they are. Hoping their sex and cloying sweat will keep them alive or given another portion of ration, the newest currency for the oldest trade. You know they whore themselves for the militia men, men who were farmers before they were given guns. But more, you hate the men who were chosen to live, the ones who didn’t even have to win their life by holding a gun. They’re the worst type of coward. You wish you knew why they didn’t stand against the verdict, an outrageous decree that would murder their neighbors, but all that really matters is that they didn’t. Even you used a knife stolen from an abandoned kitchen.

This kind of life doesn’t allow time or thought for daydreams but you have hours to wait before you might have a chance to steal some scraps. They were supposed to live. You were not. That is the part that defines your life now. You do what you need to do to survive. That’s the type of motivational poster you needed in school. Not any of that ‘Be Your Best’ campaign shit that school systems still plastered their walls with from centuries ago.

You have people waiting for you and that’s new. It’s a different type of drive now, makes you more vicious.

There were two boys. Two kids who crawled out of their own hells to follow you.

They’re gone now. Hidden away in the rocky outcroppings in the lower fields or maybe they’ve gone somewhere else. Its better you don’t know where they are.

You are a scavenger, now. Barely human.

Who knows what you might do to them for your own survival. In the fields that have become wastelands, you come across a body of one of Kodo’s foot soldiers; the corpse only recognizable because of the white armband. He’s missing his face, but his body is well fed. It’s a fresh kill. Fresher than most of the other corpses you’ve come across. Still, the skin is already the plastic type of rubber.

Maybe in another life you would have found another way around it, maybe in a kinder universe you’d be on the other side. You’d have the rotten luck of using your mouth or body for scraps. Maybe in that life you’d even be a hero. You’d find a way to end this. You’d be a better person. You’d still be a person. You wouldn’t even think of it, wouldn’t even contemplate it. Or maybe you’d have a white armband.

But this is your life. So, you pick up the sharp edged rock and use it. You use it to cut flesh from bone, scraps of rubbery flesh laid out on dusty ground, stock piled like mangled bacon scraps left out raw on the counter for too long. The skin’s turned gray long before you came and the fat from the upper arm hangs in strings and clumps like cottage cheese, yellow like spoiled food. You’re not a boy, anymore. You’re a vulture, a beast bent on survival. Twisted and wrong.

The meat slides wet and fatty across your lips. It’s a relief on your chapped lips, burned where skin has flaked away in thirst. You suck the fat like a child with its mother’s tit. There’s blood and chunky gore that you chew between your teeth; and if any part of you were still human, you would choke on it. Vomit it up in huge gut-twisting heaves. You’re lucky you haven’t any children left to feed. That’s a horrible thing to think. But almost every truth has a bit of something terrible in it.

This is how you will live for the next eight days.

Then, you get sick. Bowl-emptying, dry-heaving, snot-snorting sick with cramps so tight you hear your bones creak. You lie in the ruins of a burned out shed, blood and white gunk leaking from your ass. Time passes in a way that only the dying can know: quick, and blurry, and too precise to measure. You ache. You’re filthy and the stench that you’ve been sitting in for at least two sunrises is crusting on your thighs.

Days pass but you’ll never remember them.

Afterwards, you’ll wake to your worst nightmare.

 

 

 

_Jim wakes up slowly, hurting all over but Jim knows how to forget about things like that._

There are metal walls and synthetic sheets saturated with your sweat. They stick to you. Or maybe, you stick to them. What matters is that you’re stuck somewhere with dim lighting and you have no idea if your situation has vastly improved or just gotten terrifyingly worse. You sit there in the unknown for a long time. Time is nothing anymore. Maybe you’re dead and every culture’s got it wrong and this is hell. You might be alone or you might not. You can’t see well. A background noise permeates the place and you slowly grow more and more aware of it. It’s the mechanic lullaby of big machines and air conditioning.

You’re face hurts. It’s a raw ache of open wounds and skinned knees. Your hand comes away wet, you can’t see well but it smells of infection. You wake up again not realizing you’ve fallen asleep. You wake up a third, then a fourth time, each time slipping in and out of consciousness only knowing one difference from the other by the hollow flat feeling inside.

Later, you become aware of agonized moaning somewhere close by but not where you can see. You’re somewhere else again and it’s just now you’re realizing it. The lights are different and the air smells of solvents. Your eyelids hurt but when you swing your gaze to the side you see that there’s a glass of water next to you. You stare at it for a while, thirsty but you’re unable and unwilling to move your arms. The clear liquid looks delicious but surely it’s a mirage. You think you would never want for anything again if could have the water. Feel the soothing relief on your parched throat and feel it settle your stomach. Water, life giving water, that’s all you need.

You’re so tired, though.

You do it, though because fuck all if you’re going to give up now. You move your unresponsive limbs, grabbing at the glass with numb fingers. It’s a small plastic cup and heavy.

It makes a wet clang when it hits the ground. 

It’s probably a good thing you fall asleep.

You dream and birds drop from branches. An announcement comes and neighbors go to neighbors and soon everyone gathers in the town center to hear the man with a solution. Fathers walk through town swinging axes. A hand clutches at your pants. It’s a small thing with scared eyes. You pick him up under the arms and tell him to hold on as tightly as he can. You run.

“James, James, look at me.” A strange man is shining a light into your eyes, the afterimage is blue. You try and move away from the hands grabbing at your face but then there are more of them on you. You’re twisted inside out and whatever you thought had hurt before is nothing now. There’s something going through your nose and down the back of your throat. It feels more violating than an unwashed cock. “James!”

You try and ask who the fuck is James.

You are a corpse, suffering life.

You are a study in body horror.

You don’t think anyone else has realized this facet of your existence. You do. Of course you do, you’re the corpse being forced to live because of the tubes and wires they shove down your throat and under your skin. You feel the itch and you want nothing more than to pull your skin apart to see where those wires are going if only you could move your hand. You are a blinking coma patient that swallows and shits. You have to blink over and over because the drugs make your tongue feel fuzzy. You have a tube in your mouth and one up your tiny limp dick. One going in and one going out, you’re a cog in a machine. You are bones and skin and swollen hands. The side of your face is a mess of yellow pus and dried blood. You have to blink over and over because the drugs make your tongue fuzzy. You repeat yourself often.

Or maybe you’re just bad at handling this sort of thing.

You dream and you see a boy you know hanging by his neck from a tree. His flesh has been torn open and mold festers in his stomach and down thighs. A series of bats hang from their necks, their wings are broken, you don’t understand why. His mouth is cut open from a saw blade. His top lip begins near his earlobe and his bottom lip sags under his chin. He’s naked. You see his body sunken in and rotting. It’s nasty. You don’t know if that happened. You don’t know what happened to him. Things become fuzzier every time a nurse gives you an injection.

Maybe there wasn’t even a Tom. That’s scarier than any other thought you have had.

You make a fuss about seeing the other kids, your kids, and later two nurses wheel you into another part of the hospital, the older section. The room is long and narrow. Beds line the sides of the room like a wartime hospital.  The window in the back is open but the blinds are closed. The breeze makes a clack, clack when they knock against each other. There are curtains separating each patient. You can’t see them but you can hear their wheezing breaths. The noise is distracting. It’s long been known that patient’s heal quicker when given the privacy of their own rooms. You don’t have to guess what this means. This is the room for the dying.

The tests come back inconclusive.

You might have a hidden disease or infection contributing to your illness, they use the term with growing frequency. Men in white coats come and ask you what you remember, not how you feel. Four of them stand with perfect posture and a military grade press of their pants. You know that because you’re observant and something isn’t right.

You’ve seen the needles they inject in the patients who start to speak. It may not be entirely true but something isn’t right so you tell them you remember nothing. They shoot you full of drugs, anyway. You puke. The drugs make you compliant and confused. The drugs make you the perfect patient. You feel the walls close in and expand. You’re in a four-wall heartbeat. Your head pounds and all you can think about is how to escape, how to find Kevin. 

They ask you what you remember. You tell them everything.

The nurse frowns, checks the paperwork by your bed. Sighs, and gives you another shot.

Kevin asks you to tell him that everything won’t end in death, you hear him speak in a dream but then dead reeds wrap themselves around the toddler’s throat and he’s quiet, so very quiet. Pollen covers the child’s head like a halo. You dream of clouds with children shapes, a fox chasing them into the mountains and into rabbit holes. You dream of many things. 

When they ask you what you remember you shake your head, confused.

When they ask if you remember anything you say no, because it’s almost true.

You vomit ice chips.

You didn’t know you could be alive and feel so dead. But you dream. You dream of sunflower hued butterflies which glisten like spilled craft glitter. For Kevin, a sky filled with balloons, each the size of mountains.

They ask you what you remember. You ask when you can leave. They repeat their question. You look at the wall. A sitcom is playing on the holovid-player. The audience applauds as another needle enters your neck. You don’t want to eat but you know you should. The nurses complain when you don’t. Eggs, toast, water and orange juice. Your morning meal.

The bread tastes different today.

You gasp. You gasp, again. You gasp until you’re fucking hyperventilating. You’re shitting your gown and vomiting burning bile on your too-thin bedsheet. Alarms buzz and there’s a rush of ugly shoes on tile, white coats caught in a windstorm of movement. The sight of it all scares you. They are no longer coats but monsters. They scream at you but you can’t make sense of what they’re screaming. They grab your arms and legs, so tiny now. You’re being devoured. You wish someone would keep them away from you. You wish you were anywhere but living this life. You want to leave, you want out. You want out. They’re still screaming.

You flat line.

You wake disoriented and in pain. The burning aftermath of having a tube down your throat isn’t new to you. You’ve had allergy reactions before. It’s really not a big deal. Not usually. Someone didn’t read over your chart or didn’t know what one of the incongruously long polysyllable words on the back of a package meant. This time it was a nurse and not your mother or uncle. It’s not a big deal, really. You still end up balling like a baby. You are a pathetic little goober. You’ve got snot rolling down your chin and each breath just makes the burn deeper. It hurts. You want to go home. You want your mom to come and hold you, take you to someplace better, a place where all of this can just fade away. You feel the slide of a needle, instead.

It’s a different day but so many of them blur and recede into the back of your mind like you’re not even here, like you’re not even alive. Time ticks by and you stare at the sun moving across your wall. You sleep. The doctors who come to visit call it rest. You dream of tiny children with rotting skin between their teeth. You wake screaming and to the foreboding sound of a locked door trying to be opened.

You watch the nurse. You don't recognize him. He’s big and tall, his hands big enough to hold a weapon steady. His ears are pointed and his hair short as if someone took clippers to it recently. Not human, but that isn't unusual. You don’t like it when he touches you. Your head feels fuzzy. Fuzzy and fuzzier and like a show turned into static, nothing. Something comes loose and unhinges in you. Like a cabinet door broken at the hinge, it...you, it..he doesn’t say anything when you pull away. You don't see him again. 

Another day. Another day. Another, then you have two people in front of you. A man and a woman.

Your mother.

She’s older. You see her on the recorded videos she sends. Like a celebrity grown old, thinner hair and lines around her eyes and mouth. Static rings in your head.

 

 

 

 

 

So much static. It’s easier to look at the man.

You know this man. Frank. Know how to hate this man. But that hatred, that pain is familiar to you. Months and months, and years and years, and a millennium ago you knew what it was like to want to escape from that monster. Knew what it was like to want to leave your uncle’s guardianship.  He seems smaller now. Now, you don’t know what it’s like to want for anything but sleep. You uncle asks you whether you want to stay here or go home. You don’t want to think right now. You don’t want anything. Your mother and your uncle leave. You’re so weak. They leave you sealed in a white room with a dozen other survivors and doors that lock.

They leave you and you dream.

“Jim! Stop that, you’re going to upset the IV.”

Who? Oh, you think. Right, you’re Jim.

Then nothing.

When you wake your mother is at your bedside sitting in one of the chairs they have for visitors. “How do you feel?” She asks, fingers tapping against the chair’s arm. Her hair is still almost red and cut into a sever bob. It’s not a good look on her. She wears a dress and lipstick, you wonder if that was because she saw a doctor she wanted to impress. Her nails are bitten down to the skin. Tom used to do that when he was nervous; if there was a Tom. You tell her the truth. You feel shitty.

“Jesus Christ, Jimmy.” Those are your mother’s words to you before she’s crying. They’re her first words to you in over a year, maybe more than a year. Whatever, you think. It’s not the first time your mother’s cried at the sight of you. You sleep.

When you’re wake you see your mother sitting at your bedside. Maybe this part is a dream. She’s reading a fashion magazine. She looks beautiful. She’s had time to redo her makeup. The powder is caked on her right cheek. You ask where your uncle is. She looks up but ignores your question to ask how you’re feeling. Her teeth are white and straight and you think of all the women on the colony who made the same face. You stare at her until the smile falls and your uncle comes in carrying coffee.

They ask how you feel. You’re so sick of that question.

You tell them, “I just wanna go home.”

Your mom starts crying again and looks away. You hurt her all the time.

Uncle Frank looks you square in the eye but his gaze lands on your rotting cheek and slides away. He must like the pattern of tiny boats on your hospital gown. You are in the children’s wing. He looks at it for a long time. He doesn’t know what to say. You can read it by the way he plants his feet, clears his throat in readiness, then sighs and looks away instead.

They tell you they’re taking you home.


	2. Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> James T. Kirk returns home and eats poptarts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings apply.

The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain. - Karl Marx

 

 

 

 

You’re home and it’s quiet. Iowa has always been that way.

Even during the last world war and most of the United American Continent was ravaged; Iowa has always been a state of vacant lots and empty fields. It’s a monument to abandonment stretched out over ninety-thousand square miles. Your hometown is a patchwork quilt. Field, quarry, and town rest next to each other with roads run along the seams. You’ve seen pictures of a different Iowa in textbooks; an Iowa with trees and hills and people. That was before the last war, before the climate changes, before the mining processes, before someone had thought to level most of the middle states as shipyards or weapon testing for Starfleet.

The house is the same ruin you had left.

Your room’s still the same. Cleaner, maybe, in a way that’s hard to define. The toys you no longer play with rest on shelves, a poster of the voluptuous Tellabite singer Miitz is still pinned to your wall amongst maps and diagrams of the starships your mother has sent you over the year, even your model airplanes hang from your ceiling. There’s something missing and you wish you knew what it was.

In another life maybe your mother would be the kind of person to keep the white floors clean of scuff marks and have fresh cookies waiting. Maybe this would have been a life saturated with forehead kisses and self-pity.

As is, your mother and uncle have placed themselves in the ill-fitting roles of caretakers. They come in to bring you meals you sometimes eat. Toast and applesauce. Occasionally yogurt. They come to offer medicine, to change the sheets.

You expected yelling.

Instead it’s quiet. Shuffling sounds of life coming up from the lower floor but distant. The world becomes real when you sleep.

You dream of a hell made of dead flesh, with doughy, toneless stomachs and thighs, toneless. It seems unreal until you drag yourself to the bathroom mirror. It is the version of you that you've only seen glimpses of in the reflective surfaces of the hospital.

The mirror shows you a creature of great ugliness. The body is a patchwork of flab and bone and muscle sitting heavy in wrong areas.

You’re flabby, weak, and quiet.

You don’t recognize your own reflection, so it’s fitting your thoughts are unfamiliar, too. The medication affects your mind. You’re white noise and flat static. You are nothing but the absence which defines you.

You sleep. Your head rolls sluggishly. You dream, amazing, surreal nightmares. Every night you’re in a crop field. The wind brushes against you as you stare into the black of the night. You stand with arms to your side, stiff. Your eyes are closed, head back, mouth stretched open and filling with ashes.

You dream of boys you played ball with now buried under rock, skulls caved in and feasted on. You dream of men with white armbands and no eyes raping women in red dresses. You dream about the smell of bacon fat.

You wake screaming. Terrified and choking.

Your uncle gives you medicine to take. It's quicker to swallow than it is to listen to his ragged breaths or see how his mouth stretches thin. It's easier to take the pills than live.  
Life becomes small. You rest on your side and look at your walls. You look at your walls. Your eyesight doesn’t work right and things close up are blurry. You aren’t able to work a padd or read your printed books. Hologram vids make your eyes hurt. Even the near ancient television your uncle drags up from the basement with your mother’s prodding causes nausea.

Instead, you look at the straight lines on the diagram. You reread and reread the labels and the schematics of USS Constellation NX-04, UESN-814 Minotaur Fighter pilot, ENC-28 Odysseus Explorer Class, Archer PC-59 System Patrol Cruiser, and the 3-Finger Variant NX Drydock. You have the diagram for an Orion satellite and two computer layouts of Vulcan Navy Patrol Cruisers labeled in languages you don’t understand. Your mother has contacts in engineering and the pride of your collection are the inside electrical schematics of a Romulan Assault Ship with an unknown designation but what you start calling Raptor.

Your mother asks you if you’d like a computer, and older model laptop with a physical screen and keyboard. She suggests that the light from the projections messes with your eyesight. You shrug. It won’t matter and the machine she brings stays unused on your nightstand. It doesn’t matter.

You're a corpse after all.

It is your uncle that comes with board games. He brings you your grandfather’s old chess set and a deck of cards. “You’re driving your fucking mother crazier than she was.” Frank says, not looking at you. He barely ever looks at you, barely says a word. Barely touches you and never in anger. Doesn’t linger on your lips or stroke your neck. He doesn’t look at you like he used to.

You think you have finally won the war you and Sam had staged against your uncle since you were left with him.

You think about Sam and you know that the war of pranks and threats and screaming had been lost a long time ago.

You awake screaming.

It has become routine, but this time when you wake it’s different.

It's night.

Your mother stands next to your bed, watching with an unrevealing expression. It’s scary. Maybe it’s the light, or maybe she’s always had that look and it’s just now that you’re noticing. There are bags under her eyes, deep bruises from exhaustion. She’s looking at you but it’d be a gamble to say she’s seeing you. She turns and walks out. She moves slow and with the halting pace of someone who has thoughts of something horrible. Someone who wants to survive.

Your childhood night light reflects off something. In her hand is a pair of scissors.

You wake to the morning light, shaking and terrified and unsure of everything.

You start to lock your door at night.

Frank makes a comment about dirty sheets. The first day your mother won't look you in the eye.

Time passes, your model airplanes move in tiny circles if your window is open. Time passes.

 

_Beep. Beep. Beeeeep. Beep. Beep. Beeeeep. Still alive.  Beep. Thank fucking Christ._

_"Damnit, Jim."_

_Beep._

 

You eat, you sleep. You shit, you eat.

After another dream that leaves you strung out with the taste of bile in your mouth, you don’t want to eat.

Eating anything but toast and bland mush doesn't stay down for long. You can't do anything that looks or smells like meat.

What you can swallow feels like lead and gravel in your stomach. You’re horribly dehydrated and the shots of saline help but you still suffer vertigo.

You're visited by a doctor. She's young, stern in her expression and words but her hands are gentle as she evaluates you. She prods and asks questions. Reflexes are slow but show sign of healing. Eyesight is clear but will need surgery to fix the slight farsightedness in your right eye in a few years. Grip strength weak and will be watched until it falls into normal range for fourteen year old human males.

"Fourteen?"

"Pardon?" She queries back. The last you remember you were thirteen. Thirteen and angry and driving cars off cliffs and getting sent to distant relatives somewhere else.

Fourteen and dead.

Height and weight are both under your projected development milestones. Abdominal soreness is chalked up to a combination of IBS and scar tissue. Past indications of broken bones and scars are attributed to childhood antics. She's seen your file.

"You've regressed in your healing due to a combination of remembering hallucinations and pavor nocturnus, nightmares."

"Hallucinations?"

"Yes, Mr. Kirk." She says as if you're being wilful. As if this isn't your first time hearing about anything. As if it doesn't matter anymore, maybe you have heard it and maybe it doesn't matter."You came to Starfleet medical suffering hallucinations. The crops of the Tarsus IV colony were attacked by an outside parasitic fungus. It caused a plague. If ingested the symptoms ranged due from mild diarrhea to death usually due to body weight and previous health. In some cases, like yours, hallucinations were caused. You lived though a very unfortunate event."

Bedside manner, you think.

"Unfortunate." You parrot back to her. Uselessly. She takes it as confirmation.

She says you must start Physical Therapy. Physical therapy leaves you strung out and sore. Hours of tests and hypodermic needles packed with vitamins and minerals.

You’re getting so used to the contents of your stomach wanting to barrel their way up your throat. The good lady doctor worries about stomach acid deteriorating the lining of your throat. Personally, you think that’s the least of your worries. Hours pass.

You are unable to do anything. Dependent for everything, you can’t even grab yourself a drink when the dehydration headaches come.

You’re a fucking princess trapped in the tower.

“How are you feeling, Jimmy?”

Your mother brings you in a plate of food. It’s chicken, carrots and mashed potatoes on the best china in the house, fancy. The carrots are a bright, happy orange. You’re surprised that your mother can cook. It’s homemade, you can tell. You dig in tentatively. The carrots taste wonderful, and you’ve always liked carrots. You eat them life a ravaged dog.

“Don’t forget to eat your chicken, Jim.” She leaves.

You take a bit of the chicken. The string white meat tears under your incisors. Your saliva mixes with the meat, you chew. You swallow.

You're a survivor.

The food cramps your stomach, knots it into something unrecognized in your guts. All you can do is clench your fists and bear down through the pain. You vomit everything. You sit for a long time, breathing deep and sweaty. You watch her until you fall asleep with puke all over your sheets. It reeks. You’d recoil at the pain and the stench, but you’re too used to it. It’s familiar. Your gag reflex reaching down deep, but you have nothing left to bring up. The disgusting backwash of illness and bile becomes a sense memory you’ll never be able to forget, because that smell is you. That smell is your weak body.

You wake to your uncle stripping the sheets off the bed, off you. You shiver, freezing. Another day in your life.

You’ve heard humans can die of exposure. You’re rattling from the cold. Frank is wearing a shirt with short sleeves, wet sweat marks under both arms. You choke on whatever it was you wanted to say, feeling your stomach rebel at the bed’s movement.

Frank cleans you with a wash cloth, efficient, mechanical. He wipes you down just like one of his cars. It’s too late to apologize. He gives you water to drink. Slow, slow Jim, this isn’t a race. But Frank has never equated water with wealth.

He inserts a needle into your arm like the doctor taught him. His hands are calloused. You’re so dehydrated that you’ve passed the stages of vertigo. You wonder if it’d be easier to just die.

He brings you two poptarts. They’re a ridiculous food with no known nutritional value. The authorities on food and health have tried to ban kids from eating them for years. Big business profits are the reason why that never happened.

You’re uncle brings them on a plate that you’ve used all your life. "Just fucking eat it, kid."  
Just fucking shut up. Just fucking get down from the tree. Just fucking be quiet. Just fucking be grateful already. Just stand still you little shit. Just fucking leave like my ungrateful sister and her dead fuck. Just leave like your useless brother. Just fucking swallow it. Just fucking take it, you little bastard. Just fucking pass the remote you little shit.

The retro turquoise plate has a chip in the side. It’s like you’ve never left. You’re chest feels tight. You imagine your tiny bronchioles refusing to open. It’s like you’ve never left.

You eat it.

Today's poptart is the strawberry kind because that’s the only kind worth eating after a week of them. The white frosting has sprinkles on it. It’s like sugar confetti. It was Sam’s favorite snack, you don’t know if it still is. You still don't know where Sam is.

Frank breaks one poptart into little pieces. Holds it to your lips, pausing to let you stretch up and open your mouth around each bite. You don’t look at the remaining poptart but that’s fine. There’s a routine by now and Frank takes the plate and puts it under your bed with the other food you’re squirreling away. The psychologist they consulted said it was normal, so you’re allowed to hide food away.

It helps you sleep at night.

You hear your mother and uncle arguing through your floor beds.

You miss Sam so much.

There's yelling. Cabinet doors slamming. Instead of your big brother it's two grown adults screaming about the nutritional value of poptarts. A door slams and an engine starts. You have no idea who’s stayed. You don’t think it really matters.

You close your eyes and sleep.

In the morning, your mother makes jokes about being lazy and pets your hair. You’re corpse in a coma but no one else seems to understand.

The pain in your abdomen becomes sharp. You twist and turn to take the edge off. You have to kneel and press your stomach against the side of the mattress for comfort. You grip the sheets and try to breathe through it.

Sometimes your head aches. A migraine will leave you temporarily blind in one eye and shivering on the floor. You think you might be dying but you wake up hours later with the sun in your eyes. Knock, knock, two quick wraps with someone knocking on your door to tell you breakfast is ready.

You get up to unlock the door.

Today, you sit on the toilet and eat cereal, synthetic corn sugar and food dye. You eat for the colors. You eat even as you defecate, ignoring the stench. You chew slowly and stop eating even though there’s half a bowl left and you’re still hungry. You don’t need to wait long before you’re curled over the sink, puking, stomach rolling. You watch as each wave brings more pieces of the rainbow back up. It goes up your nose. The sickly sweet-sour taste clings to the back of your throat. It’s all you smell.

When you’re that sick, death doesn’t seem such a bad option. You clean up the best you can. Wipe a few chunks from your tongue with your toothbrush, rinse. You blow snot and vomit onto your shirt. Then, you go back to the toilet to finish shitting. This is the rhythm of your life.

Sometimes you feel good, strong and independent. You walk to the bathroom by yourself. You get up to grab a book to read. You dress. It’s a victory. Fatigue overtakes you and you’re appetite leaves you and you’re forced to climb back into bed. You’ve had to readjust your definitions of independence. You’ve had to readjust a lot of your definitions.

Home has changed for you. You have a mother now, one that stays dirt side instead of hoping to her mark in places unknown. It’s weird, but a lot of things are weird these days. Instead of the loud, angry shouts of your Uncle Frank and Sam it’s a different anger you hear coming up the stairs and from under your door. You turn your music up so all you hear is noise. By morning the house is quiet. Sun hits the floors and every day feels new and unchanged. You’re so bored.

It seems random to you, but something must have set her off as your mother insists on frying you eggs and bacon every morning. You eat the eggs but never the bacon. She uses the outdated appliances like it’ll bring back the better times. Your mother tells you that you need a hobby. Says, "You’d be surprised how fast you can put all this unpleasantness behind with a hobby. Wouldn't that be nice, Jimmy?"

It is the first time she has mentioned anything of what you are going through. Spite brews quick and eager behind your clasped lips. Unpleasantness, you think. Unpleasantness is when you get the smaller bit of pie. Unpleasantness is when you’re sharing a hospital room with someone who farts. Unpleasantness is the taste of cold fat off of someone’s arm every time your mother makes breakfast.

You think you’ve gone a little past unpleasant.

Then you think cooking doesn’t bring a man back from the dead.

A hobby isn’t going to change what you’ve been through.

Cooking doesn’t do jack shit.

"Fuck you, mom."

One morning she comes bearing the food you don’t eat, but there’s something else on the tray too. It's a poptart and a needle.

She tells you to close your eyes. You do.

The metal bite of the hypodermic is familiar now, the following burn isn't and you just drift away.

It’s autumn.

Your birthday, you recall, is in a different season.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I like researching star trek canon and have tried really hard at making sure the ships mentioned are Pre-TOS/AOS. I am by no means knowledgeable on Star Trek as a whole so please share your info with me. Also - Yes, that Romulan ship was mentioned intentionally.


	3. Whispers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jim wakes up to obscenely bright lights.

“What’s his status, doctor?” A voice annunciates with the sharp constants of an offworlder with Standard as their secondary language. 

Jim wakes up to obscenely bright lights. He squints against the feel of an ice-pick against his eye, the of opening his eyes leaves him nauseous and weak. He’s alone. The voices are somewhere else, to his left maybe if the the acoustics in the room aren’t doing something funny. 

“Jim is suffering from some version of Cotard’s Syndrome,” the twangy voice responds. “Brain says it shouldn’t be alive. It’s a neurological condition. Don’t know what that maniac’s blood is doing besides keeping him alive. I’d think it was medically impossible but….” There’s a sharp sigh, “It doesn’t change the fact that Jim did die. His mind knows that.”

“Yet he is still alive.”

“And his body knows that. People will always fight for life if they can. Instinct, if you people even understand it. And Jim’s always been a fighter.”

“You believe his mind craves death.”

There’s a long moment before the twangy voice responds. Even still, the cadence has changed. Elongated. “There’s been cases of Near Death Experience. Humans even have medical mysteries of people coming back to life after being declared dead. People talk about seeing a light. It’s universal among different alien races. The Talons, you heard about their rebirth ceremonies, right? Yeah, thought so. It’s not like people haven’t been exploring about crossing over since the dawn of time. It’s just this. I’m not sure what’s going on. I don’t know what that altered blood is doing. What’s happening here...it’s like we’re playing God.”

“God is irrelevant in such matters.” 

There was a sputtering sound followed by the sound of something hard hitting a desk. Jim didn’t know why but the bang of it sounded familiar, comforting.

Like home.

The world spun around him. He felt sick.


	4. Winner

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else."

She is not a quiet crier, your mother. Her sobs are loud even though the door to the guest bedroom is closed.

The sound isn’t pretty, high and nasally like a hyena laugh. It echos in the old house, reverberating against walls of plaster and wood.

You uncle clears his throat, uncomfortable, a rough hacking sound like a car exhaust system starting up. Hack, chitter, hack, hack.

Your uncle asks if you want any. It’s medicinal marijuana that your grandfather used to need for his hip.

It’s good for stress. It’s good for Frank.

You don’t know if he’s joking. You can’t tell anymore. Instead of answering you hand over the bowl of potato chips and wait for time to pass.

It passes.

 

 

 

 

Another day, another day. You pass so many of them.

You’re bored. So bored by now that the smooth lines of the diagrams pinned to your wall are etched in your dream. There is no one to play board games with you and finally you turn to the discarded laptop.

And even though it hurts to sit up, to stretch your arm across the expanse of mattress, you do it. It is one of the first times you’ve been able to sit up for more than an hour at a time.

After the laptop is uncovered from the pile of used tissues and empty pill packets, you take a look and it’s not as old as you thought it was. The computer is older but certainly something that in it’s day would have had tech-geeks squirting into their bed sheets.

Every species in the universe seems to appreciate their technology shiny, slick. The two plastic sides are seamlessly bonded with gorilla-glass and Vulcan forged metal. The screen offers you a range of options with big, bright icons. The bulk processing power is different than anything you’ve messed around with at school and Frank’s nine petabyte computer is a relic in comparison. You can only imagine the possibilities it can do. You want to crack open the virginal white case like a nut and see what’s inside. You want to see how it works.

The computer comes with a heap of different games, made available on a trial basis before having to pay the monthly subscription fee. Clicking on them brings up offers on other MMORPGs and ads for fifty-percent off on gaming hardware. It’s not like you’re paying for anything you download. Bless your mother’s belief that material things outweighed a child’s need for parental love.

You waste a few hours making avatars for some of the classic games that have been around for centuries and the newer gamed are interesting enough but after a certain point the material is just recycled.

For a long time the only interesting one you find is an MMORPG who tasks individuals to discover literary works from vulcan writers: Surak and T’Mei, cardassian philosophers: JaxB and Tmauv, and human writers: Shakespeare, Thomas Jefferson, Tori Morishita, or 24th century poet Gittzbarg, among others.

Most games are human focused because humans still make the bulk of online gamers.

Most of the Federation is human centric but there's nothing to help that.

In the end, you settle for a character and a storyline revolved around the cardassian Tmauv who focuses on complex rhymes, puns, and world puzzles. You've heard enough Shakespeare for a lifetime and anything by the bard is tainted with rough hands and the marching steps of murderers.

Your Character is RX, an Andronian sea creature who is a part time librarian and treasure hunter. RX has to discover the ancient power of Earth’s Atlantis to save his people from destruction. In the game. Atlantis turns out not to be a place, so much as a giant archive of literary works by Tmauv. Which has been foreshadowed since the first ten minutes.

The plot gets only one star on the review sites, you leave three because you like that it involves puzzles as well as literary references. Moreover, you like that as you go along you can win Wuwain gold cryptocurrency from the game which on some websites can be used as real currency.

Games are how you spend your time between in-house doctor appointments, your required five minutes of your mothers’s scrutiny as she drops off a plate of breakfast, and your uncle giving you medicine and dinner in the evening.

Time becomes your enemy and you defeat it through pointless games.

You are a corpse suffering life and mashing buttons to win gold you won’t use. You’re like the other fifty-nine trillion lifeforms out there.

THIS IS YOUR EXISTENCE, ENJOY.

You know you’re already dead.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is just after breakfast. You made the long journey out of your room, down the stairs and to the kitchen table. Feeling the bloated gas in your intestines move with each step. You are starving but your mother made bacon again, no poptarts, no eggs.

She caught you foraging in the kitchen, an orange in your hand. You haven’t had an orange since the hospital, it looks delicious. The sweet smell of citrus already embedded on your fingers.

Your mother is in the doorway, then by the sink.

When she walks her steps are slow and uneven. She is haggard, deep imprints of sleepless nights under her eyes. Her hair is limp. The blue shirt with blue waves on it hangs limp off her skeletal shoulders. You wonder how much weight she has lost being back on earth, being back near you. You watch as her hand moves for something near the sink, something metal. Something that reflects the morning light, something almost innocuous until the sharpened edge is revealed.

You look at her.

She looks at you; but she does not see you.

Uncle Frank was able to grab her arm before she picked up the kitchen knife.

“What do you think you're doing Winney?” He asks, deep voice teetering on the fragile knife edge between calm and hysteria.

“He won’t eat my food, Benny. Why won’t he eat my food. George loved my bacon. Why won’t he eat it? Why,” her breath starts hitching as snot pour out of her nose, “why, he won’t eat my food. I see it in his eyes, Benny. It’s in his eyes.”

“Calm down, Winney.” Frank sushes, returning the knife to the drawer. His hands carefully holding her head, “Why don’t you lay down for a bit?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then you stumble across a game that’s different.

Or rather, you stumble across the rumors of a game. It takes you another week, three of your highest ranked avatars, a small coding job, and a million Wuwain gold pieces before someone lets you have an access key to the game.

It doesn’t go like you expect it to.

The popup page requests that in addition to the access key, you also have a DN_Rondox Two-Key security pin. A quick search later, you understand that no amount of misguided parental generosity would extend far enough to cover the price of one of those security pins, infact the price of a healthy human organ might not cover it.

You’re tempted to say ‘screw it’.

There’s no way that a game needs to have a security key that the Vulcan Stock Exchange, Starfleet Diplomatic Corps, and United Earth Medical Info Bank uses. There is absolutely no reason for a game to need anything like a DN_Rondox Two-Key security pin.

However, you are a corpse with nothing to lose and you always have a backup plan. Before Sam left, you had a plan to get the two of you far away from Frank. But Sam’s gone.

Sam made the choice to leave you and you think of long, lonely days trapped in a frail, broken body.

The monthly survivor benefits you receive from Starfleet can be cashed out. It’s a significantly less amount if you cash out all at once, probably why your mother has never told you about it, but what do you care.

You’ve already died, what use do you have for a future.

All told, your survivor benefits just about cover the expenses. Enough for a one-time use security pin.

 

 

 

 

 

You start eating dinner together. You, Frank, your mother. There’s an empty seat for your brother who is never coming back.

The three of you pass the bread roll, share the butter dish, eat the casserole. No one is happy about it. Your mother has taken to making vegetarian dishes, she pours herself a glass of whiskey. Then another.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Curiosity is the virtue and downfall of mankind.

They call it EVE: MULTIVERSE.

Morbidly, fittingly, ironically... the premise of the game is about captaining a spaceship. Only here, the game doesn’t have a self-destruct button. You think of your father. You think of the easy way out.

It is not a formal game, so you have to deal with a bulky interface and the occasional glitch of any game in beta mode. Even still, the higher level of code needed to run the game tests your abilities. It is easy to understand why the high cost for access and necessary coding skill would turn many people away.

The game’s redeeming qualities fall under the political intrigue of trading contracts gone wrong and a war.

Maybe someone else would think it hits too close to home or some shit like that, but you’re fascinated with the fact that there is no perception of a premeditated ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Life just is. What’s really gotten you hooked is that other non-Federation species play the game, too.

You’re talking to a Klingon when you realize it.

You’ve never met a Klingon before, never even saw one. You didn’t even think the Federation had contact with them. You know that the Federation views Klingons as a dangerous threat, second only to Romulans.  
After you blow up his Thrasher-type ship with your mini rookie ship you get a flash of gibberish across your screen.

.pride-filled- borghel /*unknown content*/ soon will I kill you.

Your answer is a simple and sweet winky-face.

How you’re talking to a Klingon leaves you a little dumb for a while. You thought it was impossible for Federation space and Klingon space to communicate.

The Federation has documented issues in trying to connect all their member planets onto one internet, technology usually being species specific and unable to cross platforms and coding languages let alone the far reaches of space. Sam used to complain about Terra-based computing still has issues with some of the older Vulcan servers when he was going through his phase on the history of early contact. Being insulted by a Klingon across a chat platform should be impossible.

It takes a couple hours on the game’s community forum and finally on a listserve for you to realize it’s possible, just not legal or well known. There are sanctions against citizens of non-aligned space contacting each other without official permissions. Nothing on the books, nothing that could be examined or questioned but apparently it was agreed that any contact with outsiders not regulated by the Federation, Orion, Klingon, or Romulan governments’ official channels could be taken as an act of war and the person’s home planet dealt with accordingly.

On Orion, the punishment was death and on Klingon it was living a life branded as a criminal and traitor. The Federation seems to let the citizen’s home planet deal with the offense.

No wonder you needed that security pin.

You’re afraid that you won’t be able to come back after you log out. The pin is one time use, afterall.  
You ask “Another way to get a DN pin?” on a forum titled: Questions? LJ seeks VENG3NCE. The entire thread looks like Jumblejook and chatspeak had a bastard child and forgot about it. You know it’s encrypted but it’s also late so you click submit and hope for the best.

What you don’t expect is for the the screen to go dark.

In its place is a question, there and gone in a moment. Just enough time for you to read it once: “What secret will you tell the Blind Alliance?

You stare at the screen for a long time.

The computer screen stays dark for twelve hours no matter how much you try to reboot it.

And still…

Time passes.

You receive an encrypted email within twenty hours, it takes you over eighty-nine hours to decrypt it.

“Federation Citizen, James Tiberius Kirk, 01X98-5677A-0134. Do you have a secret to share with the Blind Alliance?”

It takes you only seven hours to painstakingly encrypt back, “I will.”

 

 

 

 

 

You receive a new pin. This one self-destructs in a month.

 

 


	5. Lie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Blind Alliance will want something from Jim, he has a month.

The porcelain of the ancient toilet is both cold and bruising against your thighs. You’ve been straddling the seat for almost an hour as your intestines strangle themselves to expunge anything in your gastrotract.

You wish you could cut out the deep ache, plunge a kitchen knife in and pull out the pain. Except you know that underneath your skin is blood vessels, a thin layer of yellow fat, and bloated black organs where maggots feed on the rot of the wounded and dying. You wish for a lot of things.

Instead, you cry like a fucking invalid as your ass leaks water and unprocessed food chunks.

 

 

 

 

 

You’re at the dinner table thinking about Kragg, the Klingon you’ve become tentative allies with after you destroyed his ship. Apparently you have earned Kragg’s wrath and his lifelong pursuit to see you dead. You’re learning that with Klingon’s impassioned speeches and threats of dismemberment aside, make pretty decent allies.

Kragg is very knowledgeable about the game and it’s operating features. He gives you tidbits if you give him a portion of your looted bounty. Piracy is fun but you’re on borrowed time. Loot for information is an easy trade.

You know the Blind Alliance will want something from you, a secret; and that you have a month to get it to them.

After you’ve given Kragg a warp core that he can hock on the open market for some decent Wuwain gold, he spills the beans on the Blind Alliance. It isn’t a single person but an unknown number of individuals, who seem to follow a nebulous hierarchy made from a few of the original players and some of the best hackers in the game. The most outlandish rumor is that one of the original creators of the game, a Vulcan, was affiliated. You try and fail to imagine a Vulcan, uptight and logical, committing possible treason while typing in chatspeak and blowing up fictional spacecrafts.

In game, the Blind Alliance are brutal and it’s easy to see that they are a group of pompous hackers who realized there is power in numbers. They aren’t good guys but they aren’t evil either. They play pranks on themselves and others, they’ve amassed a truly outrageous amount of Wuwain gold if their battleships are anything to speak on.

Allegedly there’s some sort of test to join them.

You’ve heard rumors on the forums. Stupid stuff like drinking a craft of Romulan Schzular wine and then killing one of Mxxoi IV’s three meter rock creatures. Impossible stuff like hacking the Orion government’s online slave labor market. Or corrupting WhiteMARQ, Vulcan’s intergalactic economic investor holdings.

You’d like to know what it’ll take for you to get another pin. You wonder how the Blind Alliance could afford to give a random stranger a month long pin. Either they have more money than is believable or they have access to the pins themselves. You’d bet the latter and wonder about the risk involved with giving that much information away.

It’s thoughts about a video game that has your attention.

Stupid really, you should know better. You are such a stupid fuckup. You aren’t aware of the stress at the kitchen table, except in the way you always are. The silence before the storm is always the worst, except for when it really, really isn’t.

“What did you say?!”

You didn’t mean anything by the question, don’t even remember what you asked, pass the salt maybe; but your mother is half-way out of her chair, arm raised before you're flinching back.

“Fuck you, George. Fuck you!” Your mother screeches, breath smelling like whiskey and tomato sauce. “Fuck you for dying and leaving me with all this shit. You think I wanted this?! You think I asked for this. That bastard kid of yours, looking at me like it’s my fault. Like it was my fault.”

“Mom!” You yell, arms up to cover any blows.

Instantly, you see the recognition, see the horror of what you are.

Another day.

Another day.

Your uncle sits on the couch, a full cushion between you. That used to be your space but you sit in Sam’s now. There was a time when you’d hate sitting in the middle, stuck between your uncle’s hard fists and Sam’s loud yells. The tension eating away at your nerves until you’d dream of hiding upstairs under your bed. Now the two of you watch something mindless and instantly forgettable. Neither of you care enough to address the silence. This is the equivalent bonding time found in any average family. You’ve seen the statistics. You’re both aware of the clock. He’s got third shift at the factory.

"How's she doing?” You ask.

She uses a Valium equivalent, apparently.

Frank says, “Shit’s good. Thinking of asking the clinic for some. Why? You want some?”

This is the longest your mother has been staying here that you can remember. You know about sailors and you know what this place represents to her. You feel it every time you look at your bed. She’ll be leaving soon, you think.

 

 

 

 

You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.

 

 

 

 

Against your expectations, your mother is still around a week later.

This is a footnote.

You have now have eighteen days to give the Blind Alliance something worthwhile. In the meantime, you’ve started taking dinner in your room. Your mother doesn’t ask why. You spend seventeen hours out of every twenty four plugged into the game.

You run search bots on Federation news sites for news on Klingon, Orion, and Romulans. There’s a difference between what the Federation publishes compared to what gets posted on the forums.  
Against your better judgement you search out what non-Federation space might have said about Tarsus IV. There’s nothing. Unsurprising, news sources can’t cover every tragedy.

One of the latest tragedies in Orion Space was about one of the Syndicate leader’s bankruptcy after a mine caved in and he lost five million rubies worth of gray Orion slave laborers. A small group of sex-slaves turned traitors had a warrant out for their arrest and when caught were expected to be publicly decapitated. A new rhythm was added to the esteemed Book of Lyric.

In Klingon space, a scandalous affair was discovered between two members of feuding clans, both lovers redeemed their honor after ritual suicide. There was a mudslide that killed fifteen and injure over a hundred on planet Quadrantvarea. The price for meat increased after a poor crop yield left many livestock to starve. Investigation into bad seeds were underway.

The Romulans were interested in trading a recently acquired planet to Orion for an unknown quantity of dilithium. A well watched holodrama announced that they would be airing their second season. A group of school children died in an arson attack.

In Federation space, a Delphine Jewel mine opened on Andromeda VII, plans for building a new line of starships were announced, and the the music group Rolerz Boys went double platinum on their latest single.

Life went on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Morbid curiosity is what does it.

Starfleet reports are public knowledge, it takes some digging through the labyrinth of the government bullshit otherwise known as their barely navigable website, but you can find it.

The report has a name so dull you almost passed it.

X.198p.000012874.AI.TASRU.04.765

Your cursor hovers and it takes you a long time to download the file.

What you open, is not at all what you expect.

There was an official report. There had to have been, you think you signed your name to it while you were in the hospital. It’s hard to think of that time. Not because of any soft-hearted reasons but because there’s a foggy unrealness surrounding your time there. Dehydration, probably.

You’ve avoided any conversation with doctors or your mother about what happened to you. Next year you’ll be given a psychologist to speak with. But now, you want nothing to do with your ten months there. You have refused to even look for the news write ups about what happened. Didn’t want to imagine the obituaries for people you had known.

But this.

This is pages of lies.


	6. Fuzzy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jim wakes up and up and up.

 

Jim wakes to light, to pain, to life.

 

 

 

 

 

Jim wakes to flashes. Flashes of pain and confusion.

The lights were so fucking bright.

Migraine, he thinks. An ache set deep within his skull, a painful pressure on his sinuses. He’d mistake it for a broken nose but he’s familiar enough with them now to recognize that this pain is deeper than the sharp crack of bone and cartilage.

Pain settled weirdly, behind his jaw and below his right eye.

Was he in a bar fight? No, he hadn’t been in a bar for a long time. Was that right?

“Bones?” He asks, confused by the the bright lights and his aching wrists. His Chief Medical Officer was a mixed bag with his bedside manner but he has never allowed someone under his care to be in pain if he could help it. Jim’s been threatened a few times with it but his friend’s a softy.

His head hurts something fierce. Is he not on the ship? If he is, why hasn’t he been given medicine? He hurts to bad. White agony pinches the back of his neck where his spine is, he wonders for a second if it’s a sinus migraine. Has he had that thought? He’s always been sensitive to allergens.

His tongue didn’t feel fuzzy. His teeth were fuzzy from not being brushed.

Moving his jaw hurt.

God, was he drunk, he might be drunk. When was the last time he was at a bar?

“Ow,” Jim said. Closing his eyes and smacking his lips together.

His last thought was about why his mouth taste like pennies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jim woke up without breath. Choking on air he couldn’t get, he was so cold.  
It was dark. He was under a bed, he heard footsteps. Frank?

 

Why is Frank here?

 

 

 

 

 

His teeth felt filmy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jim woke and it was light out. He turned his head to the right, wincing, and he woke up again, and again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“What is going on?” He asks, he thinks he asks. Eyes looking to the side, confused but he sees…


	7. X.198p.000012874.AI.TASRU.04.765

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	8. Maybe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Starfleet was there, they rescued everyone. Maybe.

The report is only a few pages, filled with half-truths and lies. An exotic fungus caused severe crop blight. Fear that people would starve, die led the Governor to determine only half of the colonists would live. Scarcity was an almost unknown word to the Federation, and the colony was ill equipped to deal with the fall out. The Governor determined to ration the food until Starfleet could arrive on Tarsus IV. The Governor determined there were only enough supplies for half the colony. 

A ship came ahead of schedule due to another incident. There was a shoot out, perhaps Kodos was confused who has landed, perhaps he had gone insane due to guilt of his decision, or perhaps the fungus caused irrational behavior. Kodos and his men all died, misguided. 

Starfleet was there, they rescued everyone. Maybe. 

It certainly isn’t any more noteworthy than a million other anecdotes of history. Maybe.

Maybe. It’s hard to think on that time. 

Not for the psychological trauma crap the doctor occasionally talks about but a stiff fuzziness that won’t let you remember. You remember everything, you’re near-eidetic memory as much a curse as it a gift. It isn’t a natural ability, you don’t come by it as honestly as Sam. He helped you learn how to imprint data and retain information, using playing cards and word games. 

Sam never could stand that you weren’t as smart as him, at least not when you were younger.

You know what memory retention feels like. 

PTSD. Trauma induced selective memory bullshit because you remember the bad stuff, remember Frank’s hand in your hair and the smell of him beneath your lips. You can recall the exact rhythm of Frank’s leather belt hitting your thighs. You know what it felt like when   
Maybe memory is a tricky thing, everyone says so. Trauma is messy, this doesn’t feel messy. 

You mentioned it before. In the hospital, before they gave you more and more shots and told you to sleep. The last time you tried the good doctor frowned, writing something on your file. She subscribed you new pills. Big pink pills that tasted sour and made you vomit and lose track of time. 

Punishment for asking questions, for trying to understand.

You flush the pills and don’t ever, ever speak of that time. You don’t tell the good doctor, but you remember some things. You remember that you were there for Kodos’s speech. 

You remember his words. 

"My sisters and brothers of Tarsus. You have elected me as your leader and I have failed you. I have failed you because I, like you, had belief in the Federation. I believed in the dream that every individual had the right to live peacefully. We believed it, didn’t we? That’s why we make our homes on a small outcrop of rock and hope. We believe that we are a part of something greater. We are the brave pioneers who break new ground and from the toil of our work we grow the Federation. We are partners to the Federation, and thus to Starfleet. They reap from our hard work and all that we ask is for a paltry return...My sisters. My brothers….”

You remember how he looked back lit against the afternoon sky. How the crowd was silent, hopefully for news. How Kodos had spoken and the people had listened. How the most insidious of diseases is an idea.

“I have news. I know that you are scared, that there are rumors of a deadly fungus that had been brought in by the last Starfleet shipment. I know that we have all seen the effects of this fungus...this cancer. This scourge. As a precaution, yesterday, I contacted Starfleet to seek emergency aid for the fungus. I have news, bothers...sisters…Starfleet has abandoned you. They have refused to give us aide...Yes, this is a devastating shock to me as well. And...I…I have failed you my sisters, my brothers. For I have trusted the enemy who would leave us to the spreading cancer which even now is destroying our crops and laying waste to our stored food. I have done the math, my family. We will perish if we don’t weed out the fungus, the disease before the rot spreads. We must cure ourselves of the blight if we are to survive. We must prune ourselves if we are to flourish.”

The report doesn’t say who it was who threw the first rock at a brave, beautiful woman with a love for floral skirts and the power to bend words but not the ears of a delusioned crowd.

“We must rid ourselves of the burden we carry if we are to survive. We must get rid ourselves of…”

Or the man who had loved her, who put ice cream on top of his cheesecake, or who liked to call you JT. The man who had his skull stomped in by a crowd of mad animals wearing the faces of people you knew.

“The traitors who did this to us.”

The report doesn’t mention the Carry family who kept preserves and canned goods in their basement were lined up and shot right before dinner. It doesn’t say how two pregnant women and Jeffery Simmons, the obese boy in your class, were forced by their neighbors to stand on a school table with nooses around their necks.

“The greedy.”

The grandmothers and grandfathers who had their throats slit in the communal nursery home. (Or the old man, Aster Carlton who had lost the use of his legs years ago. The report doesn’t say that a group of eight men and one woman had come for him. There isn’t a word about how they had pushed him from his wheelchair and dragged him through the streets before throwing him into the town’s incinerator.) Or the thirty-three preschool children poisoned during snack time. There is not one word about the ill and recovering, who were locked in the infirmary and consumed by the fire that was lit. Instead it is just...

“The unnecessary.”

No where is there a word about you.

“The unworthy.”

What you know is that what happened there isn’t what they write. There had been no innocents on Tarsus IV by the time Starfleet arrived. Instead, Starfleet’s accepted that the events that transpired were the result of a Sophie’s choice. Starfleet writes that the leader of the colony was faced with an impossibly difficult choice. The choice is between two unbearable options, that Tarsus IV was a no-win situation.

Your mother has.

The world has.

The file is corrupted, and stamped. Half of the document won’t open and only a fraction is readable but it’s enough. Enough to say that the governor was pressured into making a call. A ship came early. Starfleet was there. There had been a shoot out. Kodos and his men died. Brave and misguided. Maybe. It certainly isn’t something that would reach the primetime news, not with how tensions with the Romulans were continuing to escalate. 

Maybe. 

It was the choice of two unpalatable options, maybe.

The good for the many at the expense of the few.

Maybe.

Living in a nearly post-scarcity society led one man to make a difficult choice. 

Just for the record, that explanation is bullshit. 

Lacking faith in authority is different than knowing said authority is looking to fuck with you. Everything you read is a lie. Sources cited with one thing are then contradicted with another. There are hints at missing forms. You load page after page but the same file pages reopen. There are five pages which have been seen to with a marker. Answers you’re looking for are buried in black parallel lines. Pages branded with the word ‘confidential’. 

You don’t have clearance to know. You’ve lived through it. You’ve suffered, oh god have you and everyone on that colony suffered. But they won’t tell you why, not really. 

But you remember, not everything but enough to know what happened. 

You’d thought if you understood life could start to make sense again. Clearly you were wrong. 

Well, fuck that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for the great feedback everyone. It means a lot that you're interested in the story and hope you continue to read. :3


	9. Hungover

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Life needs a little ugliness in it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Split headache.

Cotton, fuzzy teeth and sour spit.

It’s good to know that you take after your mother’s family and their relationship to alcohol. Have stress? Drink beer. Have emotional problems? Drink whiskey. Feel homicidal, suicidal, or any other -idal? Drink vodka. Or better yet, drink them all.

Drink like a Davis.

You wake up, brain partly atrophied but with the knowledge you’re going to do something impossible.

It’s late or early, weekday or weekend. The details that run other people’s lives aren’t really relevant to yours. You hear your mother crying down the hall, deep sobs behind a closed door. You watch the wall that separates your rooms, two locked doors between you. You turn your music up louder, mindless techno and retro-punk bands that scream and scream and scream.

 

 

 

 

You are living a life where the volume is turned all the way up. You hear a beautiful song of a wrong made right. It’s a song of revolution. For the rest of your life there’s just a jarring disconnect. You are an amp, unplugged. You’re too big for your own head, too big for the room. You write out theories and scribble mathematical equations on everything because you need to be right.

They’re lying but you need to prove it.

You’d move to the ceiling if you thought the effort would yield an answer.

Instead your walls, furniture, and the insides of your childhood books are graffitied with statistics and probabilities. It’s a pattern. They stated that there wasn’t enough food to feed everyone, supplies were low.

Human suffering can be broken down into brutally simple sets and integers.

A systematic attempt at subversion within the math. It’s a lie. You start making a plan. It’s a mess of equations and diagrams. It takes you precious time to write them out, precious seconds as time clicks by so fast and you are still under a deadline so you figure out a way to save time.

You make your own language. You draw a stick figure and that represents the famous human, Mahatma Gandhi who at age seventy-four, survived 21 days of total starvation while only allowing himself sips of water. Since the 21st century scientists have determined it would be possible to survive more than two earth months, or sixty days, or one-thousand four-hundred and forty hours, or eighty-six thousand and four-hundred minutes.

A clover represents the fact that IRA Prisoners in twenty-century England went on a hunger strike and Thoman McElwee lasted seventy-three total days without eating. Seventy-three days.

You draw a spoon. Using the Mifflin-St Jeor Equation = (9.99 x weight) + (6.25 x height) – (4.92 x age) + 5 for men and (9.99 x weight) + (6.25 x height) – (4.92 x age) – 161 for women. In this equation, weight is in kilograms, height is in centimeters and age is calculated in years. You figure out what the total calorie intake for an estimated colony of humans, factoring that the average ratio of genetic mixture means that one in every eight thousand humans have a portion of alien genetics. For a required colony like Tarsus IV to sustain normal calorie intake and eat the normal, the total intake would be 3.96 million calories per day. Over sixty days, the colony would regularly consume 237.6 million calories.

You wonder if Kodos knew that. If that was a number that ran through his head while he was making his speech. If he through about the fact that most humans could survive with only water for at over twenty days if given water.

Sometimes the numbers creep up on you when you’re sleeping.

Strands of numbers rattle inside your mind. There’s an answer there if you can unfocus your eyes or stare harder, like the caped superhero Sam used to read that could see through solid objects with x-ray vision.

Surely the answer is there if you could see it.

An obsession dark and alluring starts to grow.

You’re looking for an answer, a clear concrete answer for why the Federation wouldn’t see what’s so obvious to you.

Fester like maggots, wiggling hungry things that peel skin away to get at the juicy bits inside. You feel this need to know, to understand grow into the cracks and crevices of your sanity.

You are no longer a corpse but a ghost, a memory of an event that no one else believes is real.

You are a poltergeist possessed by a raw hunger for answers.

 

 

 

 

You read and read and time passes. It passes for different reasons now. It races past, slipping through your fingers and every second means you're one second, one breath, one blink closer to dying without knowing, without….

…..without.

You know this feeling. You were born with this too bright flame of anger, of violence, of the rage of a million heliospheres, of an explosion set deep into the dark night of space.

You feel it crashing inside your head like a wild lion throwing itself against its cage.

The numbers don’t match.

You know they don’t, because you’ve been trying to rationalize what happened. You’ve broken down human suffering into an equation, mass murder into statistics. But Starfleet numbers are different than yours. When you realize that the information given in Starfleet’s report is a lie. A lie. A…. lie. A lie. A fucking lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie. No. But… but. How could they get it wrong? A mistake.

Must be. They wouldn’t lie. Couldn’t. Why would Starfleet lie about what happened on a tiny unimportant colony? It’s not rage or anger that overtakes your vision, but something hazy takes hold of you. The unfairness takes a hold of you, and grief, so much grief. People do things in grief, desperate, crazy things.

Breathe, you think. Breathe. Break the problem down. Simplify.

Breathe.

It’s a game of numbers. Everything is a game of numbers. Chess with it’s continually shrinking possibilities, Retro!Monopoly where the accumulation of wealth maximizes a chance to win, and any game that chance may play a part has a determined value set. 52 Cards, 24 pieces, 1919 tokens, or 12 enemy starships and you with a kilo left of ammo. It doesn’t matter because math is a universal constant. Dressed up with different names or grouped into odd configurations, math is always there seeking reason.

And you are good at math.

The problem you’re plagued with is that you’re too smart. Knowing the answer to every problem in school hasn’t taught you to be hard-working. You’ve never had to try to wrap your head around something.

You’ve been compliant with getting through. It’s a sickening realization. You’re lazy when it comes to intellectual subjects. You’ve always been too advanced for the Terran General Education, too smart to be challenged by private language tutors, but more over; you’ve gluttoned yourself on accepting things.

You took the easy route. You dumb little bastard.

Life doesn’t reward that type of behavior.

So now, you have to learn that it takes effort and a twisted type of love to do math. Hard math. A dude named Bertrand Russell said math is a beauty cold and austere. He spoke of its highest excellence and delight. You kind of agree with that. Except you think math wants to be so much more. You think it wants to be an active breathing thing with teeth, a beast that seeks to right wrongs and explore possibilities others refuse to investigate.

You think you might just be a little in love with your version of math.

You break things down into their underlying mathematical equations. Once that math is found, you can know everything. You can manipulate it with nothing more than pen and paper. The computer makes you faster, data crunches in a way that’s nothing short of impressive but math is art when it’s done in your head.

You program your computer to do algorithms, learning as you go.

You refuse to accept a heuristic approach. Nothing is ‘good enough’, you want perfection. You want an answer that is inarguable not just a best of.

You take the data and simplify.

You need to know more.

Sometimes need is all you have.

You’re needy.

 

 

 

 

You eat because you need the barren pain in your stomach and the headaches to stop being a distraction. You want the tubes out of your arms so you can type more freely. So, you eat. Toast and soup so bland you’ve only got the color to tell you what you’re eating. Your guts still hurt but they almost always do. Lacerations and ulcers make each meal a lesson in discomfort but your organs mend.

Oh, there are times you’re so frustrated, so angry that you don’t know something, don’t understand how to work something that you lash out and destroy things.

You are scary.

You scare your mom, you scare Frank.

You scare yourself.

Lamps and mirrors break under your fists. Your beautiful computer doesn’t break - but shatters against a wall. Tears come, so do screams. Wild animalistic yells, and not for the first time do you wonder if you really are too broken to function. If you even came back from Tarsus IV.

Your mom buys you another computer.

You don’t break this one.

You have to plug in every computation by memory, hating what you’re so called eidetic memory struggles to recall. But when you let the program run you’re filled with fucking awe.

It’s a short lived feeling.

 

 

 

 

One night you climb on the roof.

Your uncle’s old bedroom beneath your feet, six inches in front of you is a four story drop to solid unforgiving ground. It’d take hours before someone will come looking for you, you’d be dead by then. If the fall didn’t kill you instantly, death would be imminent from a punctured organ or blood loss. Your mother is gone for the night: to the bar, to the cemetery, to the complex of consumerism called a shopping mall, anywhere that isn’t near her sick child with his father’s eyes.

You sit, instead, watching the horizon. You close one eye than another.

Enthralled with how the horizon shifts one way than another. Yet, all around you is the dried broken stalks of a barren field. You scream as loud as you can. Nobody can hear you, and you scream as loud and louder, ripping a sound from yourself that’s ugly and raw and real because nobody’s around to hear. So you scream.

Life needs a little ugliness in it.


	10. Invested

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “The only victory worth claiming is the blood of an enemy dripping in battle.”

///

You’re such a dumb little fuck but you’ve never been able to be anything different.

You’re a failure. A stupid fucking kid.

You thought you were such hot shit, playing a game that reached into space. You are dumb as fuck.

Learning code is easier than learning some of the alien languages out there, the ones that rely on clicks and chirps and tones a human voice shouldn’t be able to replicate but can if you make it. It’s a mathematical language.

It should be easy because of you had the teacher you did. But it's not.

And you remember her, remember her more and more. A point of clarity against a wall of half-faded memory. She was an outrageous woman and a brilliantly smart person. She had served in Starfleet with her long time lover and fellow officer. She baked a mean pot pie and acknowledged her gambling problems up front but still used poker as a metaphor for everything. She was gentle and beautiful in her bright sundresses decorated with flowers.

You had a crush on her. Just a little. Had your second wet dream about her smooth calves.

When you crack another line of code or create sense out of gibberish you think of her hand on your head, telling you how proud she is. Was.

Hoshi Sato had an enthusiasm for languages that you try for, but it’s not easy.

She exists in the past. So many people exist in the past.

And it's hard writing line by line without her promising you another cookie for a job well done.

You're still such a dumb child.

 

 

 

 

 

You’re still a failure. A script kiddie installing anti-monitoring programs, you learn what you can as fast as you can but it's hard. A love-hate relationship with every success because you know how inadequate you are.

You go by an unimaginative moniker. You’re young, so of course you do.

You regret it in a week. But it sticks and there's always a worst one out there.

 

 

 

“Jimmy?” You mother asks, her voice muffled through your locked bedroom door.

It’s night time, and your frustration is shot through with something akin to paranoid desperation. The sheets tangle between your knuckles. Your gaze shoots to the lock first and second to the wooden chair propped under the antique handle.

“Yeah, ma?”

“What are you doing, Jimmy?”

Although it’s not remotely true at the time, you answer, “I’m taking over a TV network.” You’re quite proud of yourself for your answer. It’s a quote, one she won’t recognize or know what to follow up with.

There’s no response. You hear her breathe. In and out. In and out. The knob twists but the lock holds.

You hear her footsteps move away.

There’s only silence for a long time.

After that the night light by your bed isn’t a comfort.

 

 

 

Dr. David Grimes from Oxford University wrote a study.

One being may be unpredictable, he wrote, but when a large group of people orchestrate something large, certain patterns emerge. Grimes looked at past examples of conspiracies that would have never seen the light of day, except for how many people were involved in each conspiracy, and how long it took for someone to blow the whistle. He learned to estimate how many people were in on a conspiracy based on how long the conspiracy took to take without outside help. You think about that. If it’s a cover up, how big does it go.

How spoiled are the roots of the Federation?

 

 

 

You post in a thread, asking for coding tips.

Among the expected nonsense of insults, trolling comments, and porn links, Kragg and another player from the game contact you. You tell Kragg what you need but not why. He does you a good turn and doesn’t ask but instead sends you a how to guide for workarounds in Klingon.

It is then that you realize that you made a friend.

The other player, MSterriC doesn’t identify as anything but a blurry clock photo.

You are unsurprised to see that the account is deactivated when you click on it.

He, or she, or xhe, or it, leaves you a link.

It’s seemingly harmless but the worst viruses usually appear that way. It could be a trap. It probably is a trap. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise you if it took you to some off world snuff porn site that would tear through your hodge-podged security measures like they were nothing. You’d deserve it frankly for being so naive.

For once the feeling in your gut isn’t indigestion. You click the link.

It isn’t snuff, instead it’s a simple .txt file, old school style of numbers, symbols, lines, dashes, and letters. There may be method in the madness but it isn’t readily apparent. The API is simple, straight forward and logical in a way that you strongly suspect is Vulcan based. It’s a destructive patch for Starfleet’s security features that leaves no trail, essentially allowing you to act as a ghost into their classified archive. What’s interesting, you think, is that it’s not all inclusive. It only lets you access the top level information without notifying anyone you’re there. It’s help, for sure, but it’s not an all access key to the kingdom.

You wonder how long and how closely the Blind Alliance has been watching you. How much they know and how invested they are in your success.

Either way, time is counting down and you feel the pressure to meet your quota.

 

 

 

 

Time passes.

Time passes too quickly but you know not to waste it.

You’re playing it loose, taking a few risky projects on. You very quickly gain a reputation in the hacker community for being ambitious, over-reaching. You learn from what you read, what they tell you. You meet people, and you get better. You have no other choice.

Kragg vouches for you. It’s enough for some. Apparently you’ve been playing with one members of the original Psyc.X09 Horde, a hacking collective that had attacked the Fengari economic data center almost a decade ago due to unknown motivations.

When you ask him, he responds, “The only victory worth claiming is the blood of an enemy dripping in battle.”

You watch and you learn.

You learn that Starfleet Intelligence traces every suspicious inquiry. It’s an obstacle and your IP address, your name, your blood type, your search inquiries, your school and dental records have been pinged. You may be seen as a person of interest. Idiot. Such a fucking idiot.

You have no other option but to go forward. Time still passes.

You’re paranoid. It’s rumor and conspiracy but it makes a twisted amount of sense. Every government has skeletons. Stories of an infamous sect within the Federation makes people of interest disappear run rampant on the web. Nothing as bad as the unbelievable cruelty of the Romulan’s Tal Shiar or the invasiveness of the Cardassian’s Obsidian Order which kept a reign of terror by surveillance, or the illusive Klingon intelligence agency that for all purposes were given the unofficial moniker of KI6. The silence on how the Federation dealt with the morally gray was never far from your mind.

But as with anything, you find a solution.

The Dark.x1, an Onion router, is the ingenuous answer to your problems. It’s a more paranoid take on the original onion router and it leaves you a bit breathless. You open files you’re not interested in just because you can and you’re not supposed to, because you’re a kid. Your request for any webpage is completely off grid is granted. Anything you want passes through other routers and them onto other routers and then on to more routers until one of them connect to the information you need and passes it back along the layers to reach you. Everything is encrypted. Unlike the original routing system, the Dark.Onion isn’t completely legal. Hacktivists of the last two centuries may be losing the battles over censorship; the war is still ongoing.

The hacker groups you find provide access to information and resources, and a place to learn. You, and others who take interest, plan for everything. You never meet, never exchange names. Their political affiliations or lack thereof are not your own. You ask how to do something and they tell you. It’s a goal that you can strive for. It’s hard and days of rearranging code go by, but it happens.

You take on Starfleet Intelligence servers. It’s open to the public as part of some freedom of information act. Except the parts that aren’t. The official version, the public one, is the same as the one your mother has read. You know there’s an unpublished version, that there must be.

You use the API patch and then type in the code to access the backdoor file that Starfleet wants hidden.

 

 

 

You have three days left.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! The new movie is interestingly in line with the theme of this story - so thanks creators. For anyone up to the challenge, I'm looking for music to inspire my writing. 
> 
> If you enjoyed this, please take a moment to comment or hit the button to give kudos. <3


End file.
